New Jersey offers some of the finest farmers’ markets, and they’re a great produce source for both home and professional cooks, especially the very fresh vegetables sold by the locals who grow them.
In a previous life I must have been Neapolitan because I love pasta with tomato sauce, meatballs with tomato sauce, seafood with tomato sauce, Greek pastitsio that uses lots of tomato sauce – any kind of dish that involves and/or is drenched in tomato sauce!
At the recent Summer Fancy Food Show in New York, I found a New Jersey company called Hoboken Farms that makes great Marinara, Vodka Sauce, Basil Marinara, and Low Sodium Marinara. They are all high quality tomato-based sauces – chunky and very good!
I live in Northern New Jersey, and I chuckled at the thought of a farm in Hoboken, as there have been no working farms in this town for at least 100 years. As far as I know, Hoboken’s claim to fame is as the location where the first baseball game was recorded, as the birthplace and early home of Frank Sinatra, and the location of the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Hoboken Farms products were initially sold at assorted farmers’ markets. Today, the company offers four different jarred tomato sauce varieties that can be found at Princeton area ShopRite stores and Whole Foods Markets, as well as 30 weekly farmers’ markets across New Jersey and New York.
The sauces are also seasonally available at Amazon in two-jar packs. But you can buy them direct from Hoboken Farms and have them shipped to your home at no extra cost.
I went ahead and cooked a number of dishes in my kitchen using these sauces, and if I didn’t know they came from a jar, I would have thought an Italian grandmother had made them. I’m certain that’s the way a good tomato sauce made by a nona would taste.
I started with bucatini all’ Amatriciana, using as a guide a recipe I acquired 50 years ago from Il Luogo di Aimo e Nadia, a renowned Michelin-starred restaurant in Milan. I used the Marinara and added a sofrito of white onion, garlic, thinly sliced red peppers. and sliced guanciale – all sautéed in olive oil.
The Marinara uses Jersey-grown heirloom tomatoes and high quality olive oil, along with onion, garlic, and other aromatics. With the addition of the smoked pork cheek and the extra aromatics, the taste is what I remember it to be when I first had the dish in Milan.
I used the Vodka Sauce da solo on a dish of penne rigate and just sprinkled some grated Parmigiano on top.
Since I have a pizza stone for my oven, I decided to make my own Pizza Marguerita. For that, I used the Basil Marinara and topped the thin, homemade New York Style pie with fresh mozzarella and basil leaves to achieve the red, white, and green colors of the Italian flag.
According to the story told to me during a visit to Naples where the Pizza Marguerita originated, that version of the pizza was invented in 1889 when the Capodimonte Palace asked the Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito at Pizzeria Brandi to create a pizza in honor of Queen Margherita.
And I was not disappointed!
The secret to a good Margherita is the freshness of the basil leaves that should be placed whole on top of the mozzarella and sauce. Misting the pie will preserve some of the color of the green leaves while the pie is cooking, as well as make the pie dough crispy at the periphery.
The final jar was the Low Sodium Marinara, which I used to make a dish I had frequently encountered in Western Tuscany in the region known as the Maremma. It’s called “Pici-al-Ragu-Di-Cinghiale” and is handmade pasta covered with a ragù of wild boar meat.
According to my hosts, it’s a very popular dish, made in revenge for the damage wild boars make to the vineyards. As I was told, when the wild boars go through the vines, not a single bunch of grapes is left. They leave it looking like a mechanical harvester has gone through! And even though no wild boar meat is available in New Jersey, the chunks of pork shoulder I used for the ragù were great.
I highly recommend this company’s sauces when you want something that tastes homemade without putting in the time and labor.
Manos Angelakis is one of the founders, the former Managing Editor for 25 years, the current Managing Editor Emeritus, and Senior Food & Wine Writer of LuxuryWeb Magazine. He is an accomplished travel writer, photographer, and food and wine critic based in Hackensack, New Jersey. As a travel writer, he has written extensively about numerous cities and countries. Manos has also been certified as a Tuscan Wine Master and has traveled to wine-producing areas in order to evaluate firsthand the product of top-rated vineyards. In the past year, he has visited and written multiple articles about Morocco, Turkey, Quebec City, Switzerland, Antarctica, and most recently the South of France. Articles in other publications include Vision Times and Epoch Times.
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